Paint it Black
by Brandon Parrish
Summary: Based off of Heinlein's Starship Troopers, this short story chronicles the bug war before the time of Johnny Rico.
1. Insertion

**I**

"**War does not determine who is right - only who is left." **

-"Company Commander, we just received confirmation that 3rd Platoon has moved into position, along with the rest of the company."

-"You know what to do," he exhaled with cigar smoke. "Commence the operation. Send the order to engage at will."

-"Aye, Sir."

Labored breathing.

Racing heartbeat.

Shuffled footsteps.

Crackling speaker.

"Get your asses down! Are you trying to buy it!"

Heavy thump followed by the sensation of crunching gravel.

Labored breathing.

Crackling speaker.

-"OK, you apes, this is what we've trained for! We just got the green-light from command," came in the lieutenant. "Just like we scripted: Section A, flank south-west over the burm straight ahead; Section B, flank diagonally ahead of burm along its base; Sections C and D, full rush point! Make 'em scatter right and push 'em into the canyon."

We were getting anxious and excited. You always hear those war vets talking about how you're a trained killing machine. But I'd never seen a machine so happy to do its job as when I saw the refracted expressions of my comrades through their visors. We could smell blood, and it was appetizing.

"1st and 2nd platoons will be doing the same from two other directions. So marauders watch your crossfire; I want you guys on our asses in case these guys get smart and flank us. B'sides, there's no need in wasting ammo if we got an air raid coming in." his even tone was reassuring. "Remember fellas, this ain't no war-game. I want this done on the bounce! I wanna get back to retrieval in time for mess. Keep cool; I'll see you at extraction."

-"Wait, Lieutenant!"

-"What is it, Jame?"

-"Sir, what are our targets? We haven't been give specific targets. Who is it we're fighting?" I'd asked a stupid question.

-"Finally, an intelligent question. I'm surprised no one has had the balls to ask it yet." Well maybe not so stupid. "…But a simple one to answer. You've all been kept in the dark about our enemy for security reasons. But if you can't tell the difference between a six-legged insectoid and a Mobile Infantry Unit on the battlefield," he was cocking his rifle now, "You'd better go straight back to Zim, hit him over the head with your rifle, and ask him why he did such a shotty job in training your happy ass."

_a six-legged insectoid? what the hell are we fighting? these things aren't even human? not even terrestrial? why weren't we told?_

-"What are you ladies gawking at? Move!"

Through my visor I could see the jet black armor of three MI's in front of me, both from D. They fired up their jump jets and shot off at a quick pace along with the rest of their section. I headed for the base of the burm.

We moved. My section, B, came up on the huge rock burm with its wall on the right. Section A was above us on it. Section Leader Gomez squeezed off the first shot. A few seconds later, everyone else was following suit. Pulse volleys breaking their lines back, six or seven of the animals at a time. We pushed these, for lack of a better term, animals, back over the ridge of the burm into the basin directly behind it. With the marauders, it was a cinch. Cliffton and Hampt shelled them at long range for us with the marauders, and we mopped up the stragglers sandwiched in between. There were easily four hundred of them all over the place, but they followed each other and were relatively easy to bring down.

We pushed up to the canyon and held position for about three minutes , making sure we had our objective contained. Within those three minutes, 1st and 2nd platoon pushed in another four to six hundred animals into the basin with the rest. I cracked a few of them pretty good. The shock of the rifle shots on their legs was pretty spectacular. With the air (And I use this term loosely because it's nor "our air) pushing through their exoskeletons, it was a headshot to the knees, blowing out the joints, and rendering them virtually immobile. They were still pretty dangerous: if you got close enough, they could still thrash around pretty good. A few guys were hit low, and lost pressure in their suits. They practically exploded in their armor.

The battle itself was pretty textbook.We strafed with our jump jets in skirmish lines around the perimeter of the canyon, and 'naded anything that came within 30m of us. Several engineers rigged up the light mortars and had a field day. At one point, I tongued my visor into heat display and watched the light-show.

Even with this apparent advantage, this was nothing like exercises. The intensity of the world around me was unreal. Every light-bomb seemed to rattle me senseless. Even in the armored suit, the vibration from the pulse rifles and artillery action cascaded through me. I had my visor on at three-filter, but it still wasn't enough to black out the intense light from the TAN rounds. It seemed like a massacre. MI training for this? It felt almost… wrong. At the start of the assault, everyone was murmuring on the channels trying to get a peek at the new enemy. By the end of those first few minutes, everyone had tagged a few of them pretty good, and had gotten a good look at their insides.

1st Platoon Leader, Histed, radioed in:

-"3rd platoon, we have confirmation on your position. 2nd platoon is also green."

-"Copy that," hissed L.T. between breaths.

Histed came back in over the radio a few seconds later,

-"I've called in the air-strike. ETA: 6 minutes."

-"We gotta keep these shits from boiling over for 6 more minutes?" came Bett's voice on the headset. He was a little bored with that, seeing as he used all of his flamethrower fuel. "It was hard enough getting 'em in here! It's like trying to bend water!"

-"Shove it, private," snapped the L.T. "What did you think you signed up for? We have a job to do. Do it."

I could just see Bett mouthing obscenities through his helmet.


	2. Hide and Seek

**II**

"**Don't run, you'll just die tired."**

Airstrike ETA: 3:27

-"Sir, what's going on in there?' came in Bett over the com. "There's nothing left. They're all dead. Is that right?"

There was more chatter up on the lines now. We couldn't see anything around for a few hundred meters. People started getting uneasy.

_what? if they were so easy to kill, why the airstrike? either INTEL was giving these "insectoids" too much credit, or someone really fucked up._

-"That can't be right," this time it was Masts, our engineer ex-officio. "That's impossible. We couldn't have killed 'em all. Not yet." The break in the com chatter made me restless. What was going on? "Did they move to the other ends of the canyon?"

-"Negative," came L.T.'s reply. "We're getting the same word from 1st and 2nd. Command is running satellite imagery through coms, but there's nothing showing up. I want everyone's thermals down to heart-rate stims. We need to be alert as hell."

Everyone tightened the lines in. Marauders reloaded and moved to the center of formation. We were just on the other side of the burm above a ravine into the canyon. My visor was set to motion. The silence broken only by the rattling of equipment among the other MI was unnerving. Lieutenant was busy on the horn. Section leaders Gomez, Arriez, and Larmos were busy keeping their guys in order. The mood changed quickly.

Through the static of the coms, Masts came in again,

-"Something's wrong. I'm getting seismic activity all over this place. There shouldn't be anything subterranean on this rock, but something's up."

_oh shit. they dig. _

"L.T.!" I screamed. "They're digging! They're under us!"

I'd never seen the marauders move so fast, repositioning themselves and realigning their sights. The sections hit the top of the burm seconds after my call rang out. I almost lost it. I screwed up with that com, but I didn't have time to think about being cool about it. I would have to deal with it later.

We could see the pebbles sliding around from the vibration underneath us. It wasn't so fun anymore.

But my com started a panic among the sections. Some guys wouldn't stand still. Others would almost mortar off at the mere vibration of the ground from the rest of the assault company.

* * *

Then everything went dead silent.

It was as simple as the release phrase, uttered by the lieutenant. Formation was established in a matter of seconds. It was no longer a matter of thinking. The hypnotic suggestion took care of all that. With the spoken phrase from the officer, a Mobile Infantry Unit comes to a dead standstill. I was no exception. The hypnotic implantation at the end of basic training put the mind of the soldier in the hands of his superior officer, but was only to be used in times of distress. I had screwed up with my com. I would pay for that later, but for now, we were cool, calm, and collected. L.T. was more than capable of fiddling with my brain.

Once we went under the phrase, I can remember what went on, but as a dream. Hypersensitive to touch and my pupils dilated, I became more aware of myself and my surroundings. When you're like that, in that trance, everything speeds up:

I can remember the thing pulling pieces of Cliffton out of the arm-slats of his marauder. It wasn't a mad dash, but things were definitely not at a comfortable pace. People suddenly forgot how to use their suits and froze where they stood, where they would be overrun by the animals. There were frantic radio calls for emergency retrieval being sent from all over the sector. There was the vivid image of the mangled body of an MI unit over the shoulders of another who had "Debber" stenciled on his helmet. Everything rushed past me, and there was the surreal look of the airstrike over the basin as we pulled away with the retrieval ship.

* * *

I'm told that our platoons were tunneled under by these "brutes" and flanked. All three platoons were pushed into the basin together. There were many casualties on the way in. They run fast. But once we took cover, we must've done our job. Not many fell after we were in the basin. Emergency retrieval didn't arrive until four and a half minutes after the originally scheduled airstrike ETA which had been scrapped upon knowledge of the counter-assault. One navy blab told me they even called in gusnships.

These things weren't stupid. They reduced the greatest military force mustered in the history of man into a mass of armored fools. INTEL had some catching up to do.

_insectoids huh?_


	3. The Whites of Their Eyes

**III**

"**The victor will never be asked if he told the truth."**

It took me a couple of days to piece my, "Dream," together; most of it is still only sensations and blurs of light I will never be able to understand. Most of what I know about the operation comes from the stories and facts given to me by my comrades, and the information released by INTEL, however valid that may be. But from what I felt, I felt like I'd been watching someone control my suit: third-person view, disembodied, fake.

Out of our platoon, we had lost four of our sixteen. Three had been on covering fire for the rest of us when we had been pushed back into the basin. I hadn't seen them, but Lopey told me they were ripped, literally, into pieces. I thought he was playing a sick joke, until I tried accessing his aud-vid recorders, which were supposed to be released to all platoon personnel after a firefight; they had been locked and kept from the rest of us. Lopey must have had the best view. I didn't question his integrity after that. The last casualty was friendly. It was chaos, people's brains were shutting down, she side-stepped into another unit's L.O.F. She never felt anything. Debber carried her to extraction.

Not to say I hadn't been affected by the mess. There were always flashbacks. Sometimes it was something as simple as suiting up that brought panic rushing back. During the weeks following the operation, I didn't take advantage of the sack breaks offered during in-suit field exercises. There had been a subconscious fear that my life-saving suit could turn into my sarcophagus. Many of us found ourselves waking up to from horrors that had passed weeks before. But they felt as real and chilling as any battle that we would ever face. Units from our platoon were mistaking the brush of blankets against their skin for the hairs that covered those filthy bastards; many were crated before we even ported back at the junction house. Sure, we had four dead, but we had close to eleven, "Casualties." Reinforcement practically gave birth to an entirely new platoon. Fresh meat for the grinder I supposed.

_they really fucked us up._

It had been chaos. While under the phrase, things seemed unbelievably calm, orderly. L.T. was God, and was not to be questioned. He got us out alive, after all. But in piecing the fragments of information together, I could see how fucked things really got. I heard that there were more "Ants" flanking us than we had originally pushed into the basin, over twice the amount. Between the three platoons, we had lost a third of the entire company. It didn't seem real. I only remember seeing people taking hits and going down. But they seemed only like minor injuries, especially with the armored suits, as though they should have been able to spring back up and keep going. And yet, the sick-bay was a ghost town; those in for injuries during the operation were there for things caused by malfunctions and human error, not because of animal maulings. Much like ants, these things were grimly effecient. Whoever they tagged was dead, they left no wounded. And remember, eleven casualties.

* * *

Although the Sentinel Operation was a disaster, in the eyes of those who actually participated, INTEL was feeding the higher-ups the fact that we were able to _learn_ from our new "Bug" friends. From specimens taken during the operation, we found they were a sort of insectoid species, carbon based, organic. The ones we were so lucky to run into were the, "Ants," in the eloquent words of the biologists. Called such not only for simplicity's sake, but because they had six legs, a head, thorax, carapaced abdomen, remarkable dexterity, and strength. They were mega-versions of the ants found all over earth, yet the scientists also believed that there were more types. There were probably genetic variations of the same species; there were no indications that the ants had reproductive capability. They were all found without sexual organs, or even zygotes. The ants were sterile. There had to be more, somewhere.

I had been right in saying that they behaved like dogs. Satellite imagery taken before the air strike was able to pick up on movement patterns among the ants. Our movement had obviously been chaotic and sloppy, but they moved in such cohesion, in packs. It was eerie to see. They were bleeding machines, moving without will, but with purpose.

* * *

None of us grunts expected anything like this. INTEL assured us that, "Although the casualties we suffered were unfortunate, everything had proceeded as expected. The operation had its intended effect." I could already see the censored video feeds being played for the blissfully ignorant patrons back home.

_sick._

INTEL had obviously been aware of the bugs for some time. One could venture to say they knew as far back as the induction of the Stellar Fleet. But even up until the first operation against the bugs (which was ours), very few people had even know about the existence of them. INTEL was intent on controlling the human perception of the bugs. There would be no dissension among humans, no ethicists or "creatures' rights"; that would have been the obliteration of our species. We had been left in the dark for a purpose. To fight this war, INTEL needed to make sure that there would be no shadow of doubt as to whether or not the bugs were worth fighting.

_did they want us to fail? to die?_

This war had been started, without the consent of the governed, But INTEL was using its position to make sure humans saw it as something they would have wanted themselves, regardless of the actions taken by INTEL. In this case, it wasn't a matter of who was right. We weren't taking any chances.


End file.
